Mark Rothko

...They are pure abstractions, after all...

...James E. B. Breslin's biography fails to address these considerations, in part because he writes as a devotee, but more importantly because he mistakenly takes the dates and data of a life to constitute its essence...

...In the nineteenth century Hegel had posited not only an end to history but also an end to art—namely when art became solely a matter of trying to answer the philosophical question of what it, art, was...

...But for the artist more concerned with spiritual matters than the working out of a theoretical program, the posturing and theorizing could never have been wholly satisfactory...

...but the ironies of modern life have rendered simple expressions of beauty incomplete, and a failure to grasp this notion is a failure to understand an essential aspect of our life and times...

...There are no pietas, no Madonnas, not even simple human forms that might offer sustenance or even reassurance...

...M odern art has often been a question of the emperor's clothes, and ever since Marcel Duchamp first exhibited a porcelain urinal, artists have dodged and feinted with the notion that there just might not be any there there...

...His canvases came to fetch tens of thousands apiece...

...Rothko's work is often beautiful...

...Duchamp's Fountain began the questioning, and as art evolved into its modem role, no longer in the service of church, crown, or state, artists discovered an apparent infinity of forms with which to work...

...The artist, for years an outsider to the art establishment, became a cause célebre, and his rantings against the false security of the plastic bank-book rang hollow in the face of an estate worth hundreds of thousands of dollars...

...W e should expect a biography to offer some clues, if not come to a conclusion, about questions so central to a modern artist's life...

...and that same success, as it has done ever since the gallery system became the mechanism of art commerce, transformed the name of the artist into a commodity...

...When the gallery's owner and vice-president came to select the works to be purchased with the contract, Rothko refused to admit them to the studio proper and forced them to sit in the reception area...

...Breslin reproduces in their entirety two embarrassing poems that have survived from Rothko's youth ("And the Brute-Man stood erect and knew himself') and graciously doesn't forget to add: "These are the literary productions of a young man...

...Rothko ordered a whole bass, charcoal-blackened...

...American biographers have a well-documented fetish for excess, and the fact that seven years were spent concatenating this hodgepodge of trivialities ought to serve warning to other Boswells aspirant: names and addresses do not a man's life make...

...Living" was not entirely a pleonasm...

...MARK ROTHKO: A BIOGRAPHY James E.B...

...After laboring for decades in obscurity, stone-broke and living on bean soup, he rose to the pinnacle of art-world success...

...If modem art proffers no there there, Breslin produces no Rothko here, and that makes these 700 pages a mighty tough slog...

...In despair, the painter looks at his life's work and finds square after square of unbroken blocks of color...

...As a matter of philosophical interest and artistic playfulness, the game was a source of tremendous liberation and even progress...

...Rothko was such an artist: An eager philosophe in his earlier years, he refused to write or talk about art theory as his personal style matured...

...and in an age more in debt to Freud than the Father, their fields of color are especially likely to be interpreted rather than experienced, ascribed a meaning instead of simply evoking one...

...A photo of the nondescript building that was Rothko's high school in Oregon is shown...

...If a misunderstood square of paint is valuable because it's "a Rothko," then how much light the great artist's scribblings must cast on those inscrutable squares...

...Owning "a Rothko" became an ever-cruder benchmark of status...

...Just rhombus after rhombus of red, giving way in later years to somber grays and blacks as Rothko's self-doubts mount...

...They seldom do, and never in the case of an artist, who must needs follow a highly individual logic of development, one largely indifferent to the chronology that circumscribes the lives of mere mortals...

...It was, he crowed to the poet Stanley Kunitz, "the greatest contract ever signed by a living artist...

...Rothko watched his own price tags rise steadily throughout the sixties...

...M. D. Carnegie is a contributing writer for Washington CityPaper...

...Was this the goal of the decades of sacrifice and struggle...

...The American Spectator February 1994 95...

...almost a year to the day later, Rothko took an overdose of barbiturates and slashed his forearms open...

...The modems begged the question of what art was, and if it is a philistine response to deny the whole modernist enterprise, it is nevertheless a response implicit in the questions they raised...

...But he was also plagued by self-doubt, particularly in the last decade of his life when he suddenly became wealthy and famous...

...In the end, Breslin's devotion to Rothko's work precludes any consideration that the painter might have had reason to have profound doubts about his luminous squares of color...

...he picked it up with his hands and gnawed at it until it disintegrated, the blackness smearing all over his face and clothes...

...The prices for Pollocks exploded immediately...

...On the morning the gallery was due to choose works for yet another contract...

...The author shows us photos from his trip to Rothko's native Dvinsk: Here is a view across the river the mighty artist would have seen when he was six, there a gander at the local wood...

...the fruits of his toil became accoutrements of Park Avenue sophistication, colorful complements to the Ettore Sottsass chair and the new wall-to-wall carpeting...

...He glared at them silently and drank glass after glass of scotch...

...This is the first full biography of the painter, and perhaps it was Breslin's excitement at being the first to plough the field that causes him to stop for every stone...

...Breslin, for all his loving reseach, can't see how the man might have been right...

...Breslin University of Chicago Press / 700 pages / $39.95 reviewed by M. D. CARNEGIE 94 The American Spectator February 1994 Breslin's copious research produces 543 pages of repetitive and badly organized narrative, 117 pages of documentation and footnotes, and even seven pages of the author's tastelessly presumptuous warbling on the difficulties of writing the present book...

...He once said that viewers who broke down and cried before his paintings were having the same sort of religious experience as he did when he painted them...

...after fellow abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock slammed his car into a tree, Sir Herbert Read quipped, "Death is the greatest thing that can happen to an artist...

...The naive faith that such trivia somehow illuminate a man's life is a precise analogue of the name-brand faith that has driven so much of the excess of our century's art world—and driven so many of its artists crazy...

...Afterwards the three men took lunch in a Chinese restaurant...

...But the blessing of the marketplace had done little to allay Rothko's fears that his career had been a failure, that his paintings—systematically reduced over the years to superposed blocks of color—amounted to nothing...

...Though abundant criticism and theory spouted forth in defense of modern art in all its forms—not least of all from the artists themselves—it is difficult to imagine how an artist who followed Rothko's path could not arrive at bitter disillusionment...

...On the eve of the opening of New York's Municipal Art Gallery, one of the workmen who had helped convert the brownstone into a gallery took a look into the room where Rothko and his group were exhibiting and said, "These paintings ain't supposed to tell you anything except what's the matter with the guys that painted them...